February 13, 2012Richard MillingtonComments Off on Understanding Conceptualization: The Process You Go Through Before You Launch An Online Community

Everything between the moment you establish the objectives and the moment you begin doing outreach to your members is the conceptualization phase.

This is when you decide who you're targeting, what the community will be about, what type of community it will be, and how you get it going.

If you get the community concept wrong, nothing else you do matters. A community can't overcome a terrible concept. A community about something that isn't a really strong interest can't possibly succeed. Too many communities are created for by organizations for customers to talk about their products.

The Conceptualization Phase

Conceptualization is a phase, a process…it takes time. It's not a series of instant decisions to be made in a meeting one afternoon. It's a steady process of testing ideas, analyzing the audience, and understanding the community ecosystem.

Organizations make many common mistakes at this phase. They make the community about their brands, products, or service – as opposed to making the community about their audience and a strong common interest.

Some questions you will want to answer here include:

1) Identify the target audience

In the beginning, you need an extremely focused target audience. You're aiming to get a fewer number of members who share a stronger common interest.

You're looking for at least two-qualifiers. You want a community for {who} who are {qualifier 2}. This qualifier will be a demographic, habit, or psychographic. So it will be a community for people that {purchase product} who also {believe in…}.

This demographic is identified by understanding the strong common interest. You can't ascertain that strong common interest without interacting with members of that target audience.

If your target audience doesn't already talk about the topic online, then you have the wrong topic. During this phase you should also have an extensive understanding about the strong common interest.

2) Determine the type of community

Will it be a community of place, practice, interest, action, or circumstance?

Don't default to a community of interest. This is the most competitive. It's easier to build a community of place or action. There aren't many things we're interested in. You can make it a community of people who want to change something in the world, or a community for people who live in a certain location and use a product/service.

Review the existing ecosystems. Make sure that yours is the only one of its kind. This might be achieved solely through selecting a unique

Use a different type of community, unique personality etc…

3) Positioning

If a community like this already exists, the positioning becomes important. The type of community can help, but so does have a unique tone of voice, unique goal or unique benefit.

The positioning problem will not be solved by technology. People wont join a community because it offers picture-sharing. Having a better platform doesn't help you much here. What helps is a social-related change. Targeting unique groups, being exclusive, unique tone of voice/personality etc…

4) Benefit

What will be the benefit to people from participating in the community?

Will members learn about a topic? Will they become an expert? Will get receive attention for their expertise? These self-interest related benefits do better than utopian statements of connecting, making friends, sharing your knowledge etc…

The only way to understand the benefit a community needs is to be deeply embedded within the ecosystem. This means speaking directly to members of the target audience. Don't avoid this. You need to identify what people want.

5) Unique environment

Now we need to conquer the amateur-competition problem. Amateurs can always do things that you can't. They can criticise your brand, for example. You need to use your resources to configure an exclusive environment.

What will community members talk about? What are the major topics to build discussions, events, activities, relationships, and growth around? Gather data on your audience's current habits and from other trade press to identify the major topics here.

Have a very clear idea of what the general themes are going to be in the opening stages of the community and a plan for testing/refining what works best.

Just look at communities like WarriorCats; a community for 8 to 14 year olds. It has 17.6m posts from 64,396 members.

If you can find another platform that racks up these figures, then be sure to use it. Until you can, I'd look at forums as still the best, most cost-effective, and most popular platforms for developing successful communities for all audiences.

If you're not using the best platform for developing a community, you should have a good reason.

February 8, 2012Richard MillingtonComments Off on Case Study: Shoemocracy (A new online community about shoes)

Shoemocracy recently launched an online community for shoe lovers.

It makes for a good case study about the interplay between the elements of social psychology and platform design.

So if Shoemocracy was a client, this is what we would tell them:

The Concept

A community for shoelovers is ok, but it's competitive. It's a community of interest. There are a LOT of communities about shoes out there. It's competing against fashion communities, sportswear communities and a variety of other shoe niches. Generalist sites will never beat the niches.

This 'qualifier 2' should be either a demographic qualifier (young shoelovers, old shoelovers, shoelovers in San Francisco, budget-shoeshoppers etc…), a habit qualifier (who who love to go clubbing, who are shopaholics) or a psychographic qualifier (who believe in recyled materials, who hate shopping malls, are introverts etc…).

In the conceptualization phase you deliberately narrow down the total target audience to better resonate with a specific audience. The more relevant your community is to that audience, the more successful it will be.

They should also consider changing the community from one of interest (which is highly competitive) to one of the other types of community (place, action, practice, or circumstance). A community of practice for example for people that are actively hunting out the best shoes in their town/city. You need to stress the benefit and tickle the motivation of your target audience.

They also miss the benefit. Connecting with others only works when we care about the others. We need something more tangible here.

e.g. Find the next mainstream shoes…become the shoe-maestro (?) in your town, get advice from experts on what shoes to wear and when to wear them, promote rare shoe designs.

Don't overlook the importance of getting this conceptualization phase right.

The Platform

Everything is hidden behind a registration page. Not only do you kill your search juice, you also repel most of your visitors. What could possibly be so sensitive about shoes that it can't be discussed out in the open?

The activity of your community is your greatest promotional asset. Don't waste it by hiding it between a registration wall. Display the latest activity on the homepage to unregistered members.

* It's also best to avoid the marketing fibs. We all know that a community which has just launched can't be the 'hottest shoe community'.

Beyond registration the platform isn't terrible. It's different from most communities, in that it's not based around a forum pages, but that's ok. Shoes are graphic. However, this ignores the rules of landing pages.

This solely shows what's new. It doesn't show which shoes are the most popular. It also doesn't allow for a content/news page. Or make it easy for people to interact with each other.

Having a tab for popular shoes is good, but not enough. Most people are lazy. They don't click on the popular tabs. You need to shoe it for them.

This would benefit greatly from regular content such as 'shoe of the week', or 'shoe hunter of the week', interviews with top members, and showing the most popular shoes in a different area. There needs to be a greater narrative around this community than what we see here.

At the moment, a lot of the narrative has been outsourced to a Facebook page.

To gain a high conversion rate, people need to identify something to participate in before registering to join.

Converting Newcomers Into Regulars

Like most communities, Shoemocracy makes the mistake of directing newcomers to fill out their profile when they first join.

This is a mistake.

The absolute first thing you want a newcomer to your community to do is participate in something interacting. You want them to enter your notification cycle.

Once someone has registered, the very next page should be to a topical discussion they you think they can participate in, or a major event/activity/popular shoe they can give their opinion on right now. You can change this page on a regular basis to keep it fresh.

They also don't use any welcoming e-mails, greeting from the community manager or provide any other means of learning more about the community. Here you want people to begin to buy in to the community identity. So an e-mail about the greatest shoes to ever appear on the site, isn't a bad idea. Or an e-mail with top tips or recommendations for finding great pictures of shoes, works well too.

Anything here that helps better explain the culture of the community is useful.

Tone and Language

Throughout this platform it feels like the copy has been written by a marketing flunky than by a member of their target audience. Which is strange as the founder (Patrick) is such a huge fan of shoes.

The words you use and your tone of voice matter a lot. They help shape the community identity. People need to decide whether to accept or reject that community when they join the community. It needs to appeal to them.

At the moment (and with the caveat of wearing trainers which are 6 years old), I doubt this appeals to shoe lovers. You need to use their language. You need to speak to the target audience directly and identify their symbols. You then use these symbols within the copy of your site and when interacting with members.

Management

There seems to be a lack of active community management on the site. Many of the posts about shoes receive no response at all. There is no clear narrative to follow. New members aren't welcomed to the community. There is very little to shoe that the community is being actively managed.

The focus at the moment appears to be on developing the technology further, and not the people in the community.

Inception Stage Activities

This is a community in the inception phase of the community lifecycle. It's just getting started. At this stage, you want to hold back on your promotional assets. You want to focus on directly inviting people to join and participate in the community. You want to master how to keep people engaged and sustain high levels of participation.

Over time, as the community becomes self-sustaining, then you can move on to the promotional activities. But at the moment, make sure you're spending your time on the correct activities and plan your week accordingly.

In addition to over 100,000 words of written material, a library of case studies, weekly recorded lessons, incredible guest speakers, access to key academic journals, template scripts/documents, and problem-based live discussions, we're offering something even more valuable.

Unlimited access to FeverBee consulting.

During the course participants will receive constant coaching from us about how to develop their specific communities.

You can ask us any question at any time. We will coach you at each stage through the development process. You have unlimited use of our time. We will explain what you need to do and how to do it.

Not just to any community, but to your specific community.

This is a service we've previously only offered to a relatively exclusive number of consulting clients (at a significantly higher fee).

February 6, 2012Richard MillingtonComments Off on Establishing The Value Of Online Communities

If I asked you how much your community is worth, could you tell me?

Most community managers can't.

These same community managers will then complain they don't get the attention or support they need.

If you're not getting the attention or support you need, it's your fault. You're not properly establishing the value of your community.

You have to talk about your community in value-based terms.

You can't establish value if you don't talk about the value.

Ultimately, your community must have do one of three things.

Increase sales.

Reduce costs.

Fulfill your mission (non-profits).

When you increase sales or reduce costs, profits rise and shareholders are happy.

You need to link what your community to one of these three goals. If you can't, your community is worthless. It's entirely possible to have a very successful, but ultimately worthless, community.

Once your organization works that out, they'll rightly stop supporting the community. You need to make sure all stakeholders understand the value of your community.

For example, if you're building an internal online community, you need to talk about how it increases productivity, lowers attrition, increases innovation or improves morale. You can connect all of these to reduced costs or higher sales.

If you're building a customer community, you need to talk about how it increases repeat sales, improves loyalty, generates amazing new product ideas.

If you're building a client community, talk about sales leads generated, new services developed to match identified needs and referrals gained.

Measure the value, not the actions

This means you need to measure the value, not the actions.

The number of members, fans, and activity within the community are irrelevant to your organization. You measure growth, engagement and development to understand the community's health. That's your job. Those metrics are critical for you.

You measure the value to understand it's worth to the organization. These metrics are critical to your organization. If your community isn't generating good value, your organization should cancel the community.

Once you connect the community to the value it offers, you can determine what value it's delivering. Remember, value isn't just what it's achieved so far, it's the value of what it could achieve in future years.

Lets take a simplified example.

Lets image you run a community which sells skis. You create a skiing community. You have 15,000 active members over the year and you establish, through systematic sampling techniques, they now spend 15% more than they did before they joined the community.

If they used to spend $300 per year, they now spend $345. That's $45 extra per member and approximately $675,000 additional revenue per annum in the community. This is a defensible figure.

Once you establish your community is generating an extra $675,000 per year in sales, how will your organization will treat you then? Might it be easier to ask for a budget to hire additional community managers, develop the platform? Take professional community management training?

Value of recruitment communities

Here's another example.

Imagine you sell a recruitment product/service. You might set up a community for HR professionals with a view to understanding your audience, making connections and generating sales leads.

You set up a community, get people to join, write content, host events etc…

In the first year you might generate 7 sales of your product. If your product sales for £15,000, that's a potential £105,000 in value.

This doesn't include future years, longer-term engagements, greater efficiency (getting better at networking) and referrals. This could easily double or triple the value of your community over a matter of years.

Suddenly you're not a low-level community manager, you're responsible for driving a tremendous amount of value.

Value of Non-Profit Communities

Here's a final example.

Let's imagine you manage an online community for a non-profit.

You don't have a financial motive, you need to fulfill your mission.

If you run a cancer support site, as two participants on the previous Pillar Summit course did, you need to assess the value of your community.

You might survey members before and after they join. After a period of time you can ascertain they feel 60% happier with your organization, have 20% less cancer-related problems etc…

Again, you're no longer the community manager minion, you're the person responsible for executing a bulkwark of your organization's mission.

Don't wait for the value question to arise

Don't wait for someone to question the value of your community. Get ahead of the question. Establish the value today.

Ask about the value on your first day on the job. If it's low, then it's your job to make it better. If it's high, then you have a level of authority to get things done.

If your company doesn't know the value, make it your mission to establish it. Show your organization that you speak their language. Show your organization you're committed to establishing value.

One of the biggest challenges we face is changing the concept of community management. We need to change it from the person that moderates facebook discussions to a clear value-adding discipline.

Make sure everyone knows that your community is one of the most respected value-producing assets you have…because it probably is.

They think their community is in the maturity phase. It's really in the inception phase.

Progress through the community lifecycle isn't dictated by the sole metric of registered members.

It's dictated by growth (number of members whom have made a contribution over the past 30 days), engagement (quantity of contributions per member), and sense of community (do members feel like they're part of a community?).

A community with 10,000 members and limited levels of participation isn't in the maturity phase, it's in the inception phase.

You shouldn't be working at the macro level. You shouldn't be spending your time tweaking the platform, soliciting volunteers, going for big promotional hits, or trying to steer the overall direction of the community. This only works when you have an active, engaged, community.

Your community has regressed to the inception phase (or never left it).

You work at the micro level. You initiate discussions and individually message a handful of members at a time to participate. You reach out to people and invite them to join. You focus on getting a few discussions going, then a few more. You organize an event or two.

Over time, you begin to see activity pick up. Then you see engagement increase. Members build relationships with each other. The sense of community increases. Soon, you'll be in the establishment phase.

February 2, 2012Richard MillingtonROIComments Off on How To Build An Online Community: The Ultimate List Of Resources (2012)

This is a collection of my favourite and most popular posts from the last five years. It should give you a great overview about both the strategy and the process of creating an online community from scratch.